The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida — 2016
Sunny & exotic Miami was host to The North American Bitcoin Conference which had brought together a growing community of bitcoin & blockchain supporters from all over the world.
BitSabio had the opportunity to chat a bit with a few big names in the industry, such folks were not only insightful as you would expect them to be, but they were also quite entertaining & all around great ambassadors of bitcoin.
Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar spoke on Rootstock.io which is a smart-contract peer-to peer platform built on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain & it’s main goal is to add value with the implementation of sophisticated smart contracts as a Sidechain. Diego is also the organizer of the Latin American Bitcoin Conference which took place in December in Mexico.
Paul Snow spoke about Factom which is known as a data security platform for large private and public organizations. Factom is an irreversible publishing engine (write once, never erase), they remove the need for blind trust by providing precise, verifiable and immutable audit trail.
Day 0 (Kick-off party)
It was an evening to relax after long flights for most everyone, the atmosphere at The Clevelander was excellent and the setup by the staff of The North American Bitcoin Conference was perfect. This was the unwinding everyone needed and since we work/live/play in a small cryptoworld, we got to see many old friends while enjoying a few drinks.
Day 1 (January 21, 2016)
Will Obrien from LP Blockchain Capital — What are blockchain apps? Blockchain apps are decentralized applications that run on the bitcoin network or other networks such as ethereum, sidechains, or private chains, or use a blockchain ledger as authoritative record.
Paul Snow from Factom — How Factom helps Bitcoin scale. Factom was designed to scale. Just like you can go into a library and select only the books that interest you, Factom allows users of the protocol to select only the books of interest to their application. Users do not have to download and process the whole library. And again, Factom is like a library. A library can support the documentation of any information at all, from fiction and romance novels, to scientific journals and history books. Factom can also support any application at all that needs to document the past.
Patrick Byrne from Overstock.com — The virtues of cryptosettlement. t0.com was built to be “ledger-agnostic,” Byrne explained to the audience. “It hashes proof-trade into blockchain, but we can actually integrate into anybody’s ledger in about 2–3 weeks work,” he said. Byrne said his team decided not to bet on other emerging Bitcoin technologies, like Ripple, Circle, Chain or others.
In order to use t0.com, one will still have to use eTrade or another financial services company because “we don’t want AML and KYC obligations.” t0.com is looking into its options.
Sean Walsh from Redwood City Ventures — Bitcoin, a fascinating intersection. Redwood City Ventures is a new name in the Bitcoin industry that people are just starting to see some of their work appearing. RWCV are focusing on helping different companies and startups that are trying to bring collaboration between the US and Chinese companies to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Eric Larcheveque from Ledger — If you own bitcoins, you own private keys. Founded in January 2015, Ledger is a French startup that combines the strong expertise of its co-founders in security, smartcard, cryptography, and embedded hardware. The launch of Ledger Nano — a hardware wallet — in more than 80 countries established Ledger as a reference in the international Bitcoin ecosystem. With offices and a showroom in the “Silicon Sentier” in Paris, a production facility in Vierzon, France, and a new subsidiary in San Francisco, the young company has just closed a seed funding round, and is developing its range of products, aiming to fuel the rise of new devices of trust.
Unofficial VIP party hosted by Coinstructive & BitSabio on the 55th floor at The Viceroy. We invited a few folks over in order to stay within the capacity limits & it turned out to be a wonderful evening with lots of folks that made the evening a pleasant one. This is something we plan on doing again.
Day 2 (January 22, 2016)
Evan Duffield from Dash — second tier governance and funding. Dash (DASH) is an open sourced, privacy-centric digital currency with instant transactions. It allows you to keep your finances private as you make transactions without waits, similar to cash.
Dan Killmer from Authy — Modern 2FA authentication integration. Authy is the best rated Two-Factor Authentication smartphone app for consumers, simplest 2fa Rest API for developers and a strong authentication platform for the enterprise.
Marco Streng from Genesis Mining — Every 10 minutes a block is found, what is mining? Genesis Mining was founded at the end of 2013. They got to know each other by using the same platform for buying and selling Bitcoins. As our company and its user base grew, new mining farms were built up and several additional people hired, specifically programmers and engineers.
Jason King from Sean’s Outpost — Can bitcoin save the homeless. Sean’s Outpost is the largest provider of meals to the homeless in Escambia County Florida. We have the unique distinction of being the ONLY homeless outreach in the world primarily funded by cryptocurrency. We are grateful for every Satoshi we have ever received.
BSave
We would like to congratulate BSave on the launch of their bitcoin savings account right in front of all the fine folks mentioned here on this blog post. The North American Bitcoin Conferenceis no stranger to this kind of announcements, we wish the best to the team of BSave as they move swiftly towards their goals.
The presentations were fantastic, the hallway conversations before & after the presentations were priceless, folks from all over the world got a chance to meet face to face with folks they only get to chat over social networks or end to end encrypted messaging services. Folks got the opportunity to share some of their upcoming projects with other peers, many helping hands were offered and many more opportunities to collaborate were harvested as the conference came to an end.
Good bye Miami, see you in 2017.
Gino
